wasn't it?" The Master smilingly replied, "Yes, and had less value than that of the boat fare—one pie" (about one-tenth of a cent).

The ability to exercise a constant control over one's low desires is no mean achievement. The success in establishing a lasting sublimation of all desires is indeed a greater one. But the greatest is the burning away of all one's desires once and for all, which Divine Love alone can do. As there is never any show about Divine Love, this "burning" in and because of love is always without "smoke," i.e., without show. There are times when an outward expression of God-love may amount to heroism, but to make at any time a mere show of one's love for God for the sake of show, amounts to an insult to God. That is why Kabir says that in the act of meditation when one assumes an Asana (posture) to meditate upon God, one should at that time learn to avoid making any display such as the swaying motion of one's body, even if it is only for one's own gratification.

As compared with dreams, the physical life is indeed a reality; as compared with the reality of the Path, the world and all worldly life is vacant dreaming on the part of man. But as the world and all its experience are illusory, so is the spiritual Path that leads to Reality—the former may be termed False Illusion, and the latter Real Illusion. Nevertheless. in spite of the vast difference between them, they are both illusions, for God alone is the Only Reality.

When Knowledge is gained, ignorance is banished, but for ignorance to go, Knowledge must be gained. On the one hand, God and the capacity of man to see and become one with God are always there. On the other hand, Truth remains hidden from man until he actually arrives upon the Path, or realizes God. This apparent anomaly is due to two different factors: man's ignorance of Truth, and that Truth is beyond the faculty of reason and far, far above the sphere of intellect. The fact remains that man has become God and man can become God for the simple reason that knowingly or unknowingly, man is God.

Only so long as man's ignorance lasts will there seem to be no end to the plural diversity of illusory things. When Divine Knowledge is gained he realizes there is no end to the indivisible Oneness of God. Under the illusion of cosmic quality, the apparent separation between man and God is invariably referred to by Masters in terms of the intervening "Veil" and "Curtain." Hafiz, who was also a Perfect Master as well as a great poet, says: